The Nation magazine likens carbon dioxide to Syrian gas attack

Let's go ahead and file this under "Things That Should Have Never Made It Past the Editor." (AP Photo/Jim Cole, File)

Let's go ahead and file this under "Things That Should Have Never Made It Past the Editor."

The Nation published an article Tuesday that used the recent gas attacks in Syria, which claimed the lives of approximately 70 people, including children, as an excuse to attack President Donald Trump over the issue of climate change.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is responsible for the deadly gas attack, according to U.S. officials. In retaliation for the murderous act, and as a warning, President Trump ordered a missile strike on a Syrian military installation.

The response from the White House is not good enough, Cole argued in an article that actually used the gas attack as an excuse to talk about climate change.

"If Trump and his cronies really cared about children killed by noxious gases, they wouldn't be trying to spew ever more CO2 into the atmosphere," the story begins.

It just gets worse from there.

"The pictures of suffering children, Trump said, had touched him. Yet the president and most of his party are committed to increasing the daily release of hundreds of thousands of tons of a far more deadly gas—carbon dioxide," Cole wrote. "Climate scientist James Hansen has described our current emissions as like setting off 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs each day, every day of the year."

He concluded, "Trump and the climate-destroyers he brought into office with him such as Rex Tillerson and Scott Pruitt are not driven by compassion for victims. They are animated by a callous and rapacious search for profits for themselves and their cronies. If they cared about children killed by noxious gases, they wouldn't want to ban Syrian refugees like the Kurdis from the United States. Nor would they want to spew ever more tons of the most noxious gas of all into the blue skies of the only planetary home the human race has."

It's neat that Cole has a hobbyhorse, but does he really need to ride it around over the bodies of murdered Syrians?